How Different Are The Male and Female Experiences of the World?

Take something very basic to the human experience -- pain. The ancients thought that pain and pleasure were the two biggest problems for ethics. To experience pleasure, or to avoid pain, human beings will often do terrible things. For the Epicureans, ethics was all about moderation because it provided the greatest pleasure and the least consequent pain (think of enjoying wine without the hangover; only perhaps you don't need the wine, either). For the hedonists, enjoying life as much as possible while experiencing the least pain was the whole purpose of ethics. Modern utilitarians explain things in roughly the same way, albeit with collective pleasure and pain as the measure.

So what if the experience men call "pain" and the one women call "pain" aren't actually the same thing at all? There's some evidence from lab rats that this might be true.

A growing body of evidence—including a 2012 analysis of 11,000 patient records—indicates that women are more sensitive to pain. In fact, they may be hardwired to feel pain differently. Last year, Magil and a plethora of co-authors published a study showing that female lab mice actually used different cells to transmit pain signals through their spinal cord. And while no one has confirmed that this is also the case in human females (paging the ethics committee…), Magil says evidence in animals is both compelling and growing stronger.

As the article says, it may not be true that humans differ in this way just because mice do. Considering the possibility, however, raises some really big epistemological and metaphysical questions. Maybe some ethical ones too, especially for the utilitarians.

Well, that's one more reason not to be a utilitarian -- a matter already over-determined, in my book.

14 comments:

Of course talking in generalities and anecdotally but I'd put it this way. Men seem to have a greater tolerance for discomfort (nagging pain, muscle soreness, how you feel during strenuous exertion) but are more debilitated by bursts of acute pain. Women seem to be the opposite, continous discomfort or chronic pain is less tolerable than acute episodes.

The thing is, though, your anecdotal evidence still assumes that there's a thing called "pain" that is the same for both. That's just what's called into question here. What if the thing underlying your observation (assuming arguendo that it were true) is that there's actually no such thing as "pain" that is the same for men and women?

Fascinating topic. Although the fact that the transmission media for pain are different (if that proves to be the case for humans) does not really imply that the subjective experience of pain is different....as an analogy, one can transmit a signal via fiber optics, or via copper wire, or via radio, and it's still the same information being transmitted.

That's true. The problem is, it's also impossible to test in this case. We can look at the information being input and output, and see that it is the same. But we can't experience another's "pain" to know if it's the same at all.

Neuroscience has been promising to answer these kinds of questions by showing 'how the brain works.' The idea is that fMRIs and suchlike will solve these problems by showing us that the 'same' things are happening in different brains. So here we've got a real problem for that methodology: what if the same things aren't happening in two people reporting the "same" experience?

This is the epistemological problem: how would we know? The promise is that we could solve the 'sameness' question by looking at the matter. But now the matter may prove to be different. Does that prove that men and women don't share "pain" as an experience? If not, how would we know?

This relates to another interesting question: Writers of fiction need to create characters who are unlike them on many dimensions, one of these dimensions being sex. So it would be interesting to look at the question of what male writers typically get wrong when creating female characters, and what female writers typically get wrong when creating male characters?

Female characters written by male authors generally strike me as hilarious. I can think of very few male authors who even come close to anything I can recognize. Surprisingly, Dean Koontz, a fairly low-rent thriller writer, does reasonably well. Ditto Thomas Perry. Female characters by female authors aren't usually much like me, but they're at least like women I've met.

Guys, what have your reactions been to men written by female authors? (If you read any female authors.)

As for pain, I don't do at all well with either nagging or acute pain, but on the other hand I've noticed lately that a number of procedures I expected to be painful were not painful at all. I don't know if that's because surgeons have new techniques, or because I may turn out to have a high pain threshold. I definitely feel pain from time to time, and don't like it better than anyone else.

Of course, writers also need to create characters (independent of sex) with personality attributes different from their own...the internal world of an extreme extrovert must be very different from that of an extreme introvert, etc

One benefit of the Myers-Briggs personality typology, even though validations studies have not supported a lot of correlation with other personality metrics, is that it at least gets people *thinking* about the variety of mental worlds that exist.

It's a little like Jack Nicholson's line from "As Good As It Gets": "I start with a man, and I take away reason and accountability." The female characters so often are just there to be a problem or a reward for the hero; a lot of authors can't get beyond how everyone appears from the hero's perspective. It's the reverse, I suppose, of reading a Jane Austen novel and seeing all the men described almost entirely in terms of whether they'll be suitable and reliable husbands for the heroines. The men presumably do something when they're away from the women, but we're not sure what, and it doesn't much matter.

I'm trying to think of a male character written by a female who ever had a proper sense of purpose. I don't mean motivation -- they're motivated by various things -- I mean the kind of driving sense of honor and duty that you see in a Louis L'amour hero or a knight in the old romances.

Grim...'sense of purpose'....recently finished a novel by Harriet Martineau, a British woman who also wrote some very interesting observations based on her visit to the US circa 1835. (She liked us a lot, but did have some critiques--also, it's amazing how many prominent people she managed to meet)...anyhow, this particular novel is 'Deerbrook', and one of the characters is Edward Hope, a country doctor who is portrayed with this sort of sense of purpose, and sticks to it even when a local gossip teamed with a local aristocrat attempt to drive him out of town in the middle of an epidemic.

With regard to Tex's point, I think we're talking about the same thing. It's not that a woman can't write a male character who is merely motivated, and have that be true to life in a way -- lots of men are bad men, and no better motivated than by lusts or self-regard.

What I rarely see is a man written who is heroic in an honest way: not a fantasy character, not an ideal, but heroic the way real men really are. Sometimes, at least. The best men.